MORAL FIGURES: Making Reproduction Public in Vanuatu | By Alexandra Widmer

We have become accustomed to state authorities and other powers counting and accounting us, both in real life and online. Language has evolved to describe these operations: biopower, biopolitics, governmentality. The classic census of the Roman Republic has been augmented by other schemes that surveille and scrutinize select populations, even those living along the fringes of the global system. Alexandra Widmer analyzes several such efforts to measure and thus make public aspects of fertility and reproduction in colonial and post-colonial Vanuatu. Such measurement shapes reality and subsequent government programming, insofar as it makes public certain aspects of a population while occluding others that survey instruments and programmes ignore. “Since indicators are constituted through techniques and categories of data collection, they do not reveal reality; rather, they produce it” (21). These indicators evoke “moral figures” of two sorts—the numerical calculations themselves that are taken to be ominous or propitious, and the individuals who are programmatically identified and often defined as in need of government intervention.

Drawing on fieldwork in Pango, one of capital town Port Vila’s peri-urban villages, and research in colonial archives, Widmer focuses on how such endeavours over the years have defined women in various ways, highlighting certain aspects of their lives while discounting others. Governmental concern has focused on managing the population, first to provide a plantation labour force and more recently to control its growth and cultivate modern workers. Nineteenth century whalers, sandalwood harvesters, traders, and missionaries carried a wave of epidemics to these islands. The archipelago’s pre-contact population may have numbered 650,000. By the early twentieth century this had crashed to less than 65,000.

After France and Britain occupied the Condominium of the New Hebrides in 1906, colonial administrators tried various strategies to stabilize the population and meet planter demands for labour. Worry focused on the colony’s imbalanced sex ratio (more men than women) and its low birth rate. Women at the time reported reluctance to bear children, most of whom would die or grow up as wage slaves. Anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, who edited the collection Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia (Cambridge: University Press, 1922), agreed, attributing the region’s low birth rate to “lack of interest in life” (1922:101) although subsequent researchers pointed to effects of spreading gonorrhea and other introduced STDs. Administrators blamed older men for monopolizing young women and attempted to reduce “bride price” demands to facilitate younger men’s marriages that might produce more children. Condominium authorities also established a system of native courts. These were soon clogged by resourceful families trying to repair failed marital exchange deals, often precipitated by women escaping annoying husbands.

The Presbyterian, Anglican, and Seventh-day Adventist missions established and ran hospitals that provided natal services to at least some island women. The British administration took increased responsibility for these in the 1960s although hospital facilities remained poorly funded. State authorities gradually medicalized childbirth. They also helped establish nurse training programs that comprised maternity work and midwifery. This was one of the first professions island women could practice although, at first, families, not the administration, paid midwives for their services. Widmer interviewed retired Pango village nurses and women who they had served and most fondly recalled warm nurse/mother relations, contrasting these to what women today experience in Vila’s Central Hospital.

In 1966–1967 the Condominium hired demographer Norma MacArthur to organize the colony’s first comprehensive census that enumerated 76,382 archipelago residents. Post-war concerns with modernization and development, even in remote Pacific colonies, pushed the administration to seek more solid population numbers. Widmer analyzes MacArthur’s household census schedule, noting the significance of work in the “subsistence section” therein, in that few Islanders then were engaged in wage employment. This made visible men and women’s engagement in farming and copra production and the weight of these activities within the colony’s economy. MacArthur’s census queries, however, did not document details of land tenure and land access on which subsistence depends. These were the years in which colonialists were pushing their land claims to run more cattle for export. Islanders, including Paul Buluk and Jimmy Stephens who founded the Nagriamel Movement, resisted these attempts to expand plantations into the “dark bush.” Increasing land disputes fueled Vanuatu’s eventual independence in 1980.

MacArthur documented women’s high fertility rate that fueled population growth of 2.5 percent a year (although she ignored that of men). The independent government by 2010 was increasingly concerned with a “youth bulge” and had instituted various efforts to encourage “family planning” that could advance economic development. Unemployed and under-educated youth could derail national progress alongside causing a variety of civil disturbances. Vanuatu has at least temporarily solved its youth problem by exporting thousands of these, and many of their elders, to New Zealand and Australia where they serve as guest workers. A new public moral figure has emerged—the unmarried woman—whose dalliances create problems; Widmer notes a lack of concern with those of unmarried men. She interviewed 16 Pango mothers with young children, most unmarried and living with their parents. These women kept their heads down hoping for an eventual marriage that would provide their children access to garden land, increasingly hard to come by in peri-urban Pango.

Finally, Widmer analyzes Vanuatu’s Alternative Indicators of Well-Being project. This aimed to counter Gross Domestic Product calculations based on money flows that obscure Vanuatu livelihoods. The Alternative Indicators count and make public factors including richness of personal relationships, language skills, farming, and various sorts of traditional knowledge, and so on. But they don’t capture and make public everything, ignoring for example women’s caregiving massages of pregnant women and healing services.

Widmer concludes that the past century of governmental interventions to control and make reproduction public have created an “outcome of locating reproduction in bodies alone” (190), and made women singularly responsible for this. But reproduction—both at the individual and population levels—“takes place through infrastructure and environments as well as through bodies” (190). When the state eyes us, we should look back, and look around, at the webs that ensnare our lives.

Lamont Lindstrom

The University of Tulsa, Tulsa